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Sunday, January 19, 2014

Doomed by a slow start that left them in an early two-goal hole, the Devils headed home after tonight’s 3-2 loss to the Phoenix Coyotes feeling like they had wasted an opportunity.

With a win, they would have completed their four-game road trip with six out of a possible eight points. Instead, they went an unsatisfying 1-1-2 and felt they had no one to blame but themselves.

“It’s very disappointing because I feel like we should have won that game,” said left wing Ryane Clowe, who had a goal and an assist tonight. “We had an opportunity to get six out of eight points. That’s a hell of a road trip against good teams and it hurts because a slow start kills you. We needed those points.”

It was particularly costly for the Devils with the Rangers, Philadelphia and Columbus, all Metropolitan Division rivals, all winning Saturday. Columbus jumped one point ahead of the Devils with its sixth consecutive win. The Devils trail the Rangers and Flyers by four points each now.

“We need to get some points, especially (when) you look at the standings and a lot of teams around us are winning their hockey games right now,” goaltender Martin Brodeur said. “It’s just part of the process that we’re going to go through for the rest of the season probably. It could have been a great trip. Now, it’s just an average one."

After the Coyotes grabbed a 2-0 lead on goals from Jordan Szwarz and Jeff Halpern, the Devils seemed to stabilize things with a power-play goal from Clowe with 1:16 left in the first period. But, after controlling play for much of the second, the Devils gave up a power-play goal to Martin Hanzal with 5:38 left in the period to fall back behind by two.

A deflection goal from Jaromir Jagr with 2:14 left in regulation and Brodeur on the bench for a sixth attacker got the Devils within 3-2, but they could not complete the comeback and lost in regulation for the first time in seven games (3-1-3).

“They, obviously, came out hard, but we put it all on ourselves,” Clowe said. “We turned some pucks over and more or less we weren’t very sharp coming out of our own end. We talked about that before the game. They’re a good forechecking team.”

The Devils gave up the first goal on all four games on the road trip and had particularly slow starts in the last two games -- Thursday's 2-1 shootout loss in Colorado and tonight.

“It’s tough to say," Jagr said when asked to explain the slow starts. "That’s the way we play or maybe we’re just not good enough. It's tough to say."

Jagr said later, however, "I don’t worry about not being good enough. We just have to make sure we have at least two lines playing.”

Jagr said that was not the case tonight.

“We had only one line playing today," Jagr said. "It was Rico’s (Adam Henrique's) line. Everybody else (stunk). If we had at least two lines going, it would be a different story, but we had only one line playing good.”

That's one of the reason goals continue to be hard to come by for the Devils. As DeBoer noted, they did not score any 5-on-5 tonight. On the road trip, they scored three times on the power play, four times 5-on-5, once into an empty net and once with the goaltender pulled.

“You can’t play from behind like that,” DeBoer said. “We can’t do that. We don’t score enough goals to do that on a nightly basis. Even tonight, we had a power-play goal and goal with the goalie out, 6-on-5. We have to find a way to score some 5-on-5 goals and we’ve got to give ourselves a chance without putting ourselves in a hole early like we did tonight.”

With seven defensemen and 11 forwards dressed, DeBoer juggled his line combinations quite a bit, particularly in the second period. DeBoer said the line juggling was “a little” about trying to find some 5-on-5 offense, “and 11 forwards forces you to do that a little bit.”

The Devils had been 3-0 before tonight in games in which they dressed 11 forwards, but DeBoer used rookies Reid Boucher and Mike Sislo (sent down Thursday) sparingly in those games. Tonight, DeBoer tried to keep all of the forwards involved and it resulted in him using many different combinations.

“Before when we had 11 forwards, those two guys didn’t play much,” Jagr said. “Now, it’s we want to roll four lines. Sometimes you have to go every other shift and sometimes you’re sitting. I don’t think it’s to our advantage. It’s tough to say.”

Jagr, who scored his 15th goal of the season and the 696th of his career, started the night on a line with Boucher and Travis Zajac and also played with Elias and Zajac and Elias and Zubrus. As a player who likes to play with set combinations, Jagr didn’t think the constant changing of linemates helped.

“I don’t think it’s good because everybody plays differently,” Jagr said. “So, you expect something and he does something else you look like an idiot sometimes.”

Still, Jagr admitted, “We had our chances.”

A good number of them came in the second period when they were down 2-1. Clowe had a great opportunity after goaltender Mike Smith came out to play the puck and turned it over to him to the right of the net. Clowe circled behind the net to try a left post wraparound, but it went off both legs of Coyotes defenseman Keith Yandle before hitting the post.

“I took that route and I kind of thought to myself, ‘He’s not going to throw this here’ and he did,” Clowe said. “I was thinking wrap it and I got jammed off and I said if I shovel it out front, someone’s going to bang it in and it just popped by a couple of guys. I wish I was on my forehand there. It probably would have been a bit easier.”

The Devils’ missed opportunities looked more glaring after Marek Zidlicky was sent off for high sticking at 14:00 of the second and Hanzal backhanded in the rebound of Yandle’s left point shot 22 seconds later to make it 3-1.

The Devils outshot the Coyotes 10-2 in the third period, but couldn’t score until they pulled Brodeur and Jagr tipped Clowe’s right circle shot between Smith’s pads.

“I think it could have been a different game if we had capitalized in the second,” Clowe said. “I think that was our period and they came out ahead 1-0. I think that was the difference. We had a lot of opportunities on the second to score. We hemmed them in a lot, we had good possession time and then they got a power play and they scored and that was the difference, I think. We were able to get one, but I’ve played this team enough. If you want to come into the third and score three on this team, you’ve got your work cut out for you. We got one.”

“We spotted them two goals and we know that we’re not a team that’s going to score a lot of goals,” Brodeur said. “Definitely it becomes difficult. But I thought we bounced back with a big power-play goal and the power-play goal in the second there made the difference.”

About

TOM GULITTI has covered the New Jersey Devils for The Record since 2002. Prior to that, he covered the New York Rangers for four years. Gulitti joined The Record in 1998 after six years at The North Jersey Herald News. He graduated from Binghamton University in 1991 with a Bachelor of Arts in Rhetoric-Literature.